Yeah, it’s another aircraft post. This one is the A-10 Thunderbolt. It’s nickname is the Warthog. I like Warthog better than Thunderbolt. This is one of the few aircraft that was designed around a gun. This gun, in fact.

Gatling Gun

Lest you think this gun doesn’t look all that big, here it is sitting next to a VW bug.

Not a small gun

A gun that size must shoot an incredibly large bullet, right? Yes indeed! This bad boy fires 30mm armor piercing shells. Lots of them too, around 4200 per minute. That’s 70 per second! For comparison’s sake, here’s what a variety of “popular” rounds look like. Compare your .308 Winchester to one the Warthog uses…it’s the one on the right.

Shell comparison

The whole point of this gun and plane combination is to kill tanks and other armored vehicles. These planes do that with ease, and can take a horrific amount of damage and still fly. We have a bunch of these that are always flying around Boise.

Warthog Air

Personally, I like to think they designed the aircraft and thought they were done…then someone said “Oops, we forgot the engines!…No place else but right here!” Not really, they are where they are for a reason, but it’s still fun to think and laugh about.

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Aircraft.
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